THE TOPIC OF THIS CONTEST WAS:
The sagging porch faced east. Beyond the field of rotting pumpkins, a blood moon was rising. After a long day of moonshining, the two men alternated swigging from the same jug. They’d both heard the stories. They knew they had to get inside before the moon turned orange. Then, they noticed a little girl in a white dress skipping in their direction…
(Stories need only touch on this topic in some way to qualify. And, they could not exceed 850 words.) Before you continue reading, take a moment to consider where you would take that story…
The pumpkins were the first thing to turn. A black fungus that seemed to spring up overnight.
“What’d ya reckon, Al?” I asked my brother, showing him the forty or so infected pumpkins. He scratched his head, then his arse, and his eyebrows squished together like they did when he was thinking real hard. “Damn strange. Not like it’s been too wet.” He stabbed one of the pumpkins with a stick. It fell apart, revealing a blackened core that stunk to high heaven. Both of us recoiled, covering our noses.
“Never known rot to smell so bad,” I coughed.
“It ain’t sooty mold, that’s for sure. Beats me what it is.”
“Halloween’s comin’ up, people will be wanting their pumpkins. This is gonna be bad for business.”
“You’re right, Davey. I reckon we burn this lot and hope to hell it don’t spread.”
We did just that, wearing gloves, pulling out the infected ones, burning them and blackening the sky.
But in the morning the rot was back. Fifty more pumpkins infected.
“Well, I never,” said Al, scratching and shaking his head at the same time, those eyebrows squished so tightly together they looked like a monobrow. “Davey, get on the Internet. See if other folk got this problem.”
Other folks sure did have the same problem. The Internet was rife with photos and reports of a black fungus, not only across America, but all round the world. Crops being decimated at an alarming rate, and all seeming to come in the last couple of days.
“Al, I think you’d better come see this.”
There were videos of sweet corn that didn’t look so sweet (just black husks and kernels), tomatoes that were just a darkened mush, and cucumbers that looked like fifteen day-old bananas.
“Jesus, this is bad,” said Al, breathing over my shoulder, soaking up all the news.
“The science people will fix it. They always do.” And sure enough the next video was of people in white lab-coats working flat out trying to solve the problem. They were doing a fair amount of head scratching of their own, and a lot of them were using big words I didn’t understand ó like unprecedented, hyper-propagation and hyphal infiltration, which really meant things were up shit creek.
Straight after were videos of the crazies, the ones proclaiming it was the end of the world, and people raiding supermarkets for canned supplies. We turned the Internet off after that, and both of us stood on our sagging porch looking at our pumpkin field. All we’d ever known was right here in this field, turning to black before our eyes.
“If all the pumpkins rot, thenó”
“óthen we’ll get by till they fix things.”
Still, both of us went out there and harvested some pumpkins, putting them in our freezer for safe keeping.
It was two days later the animals started turning. Al noticed it first. The cows had black veins over their udders and their milk was rancid. Then it spread to our cat, Ginger. I suppose Ginger must’ve walked through the pumpkin field and that’s how the fungus had got to her, but still it put the spook up me to see her eyes with black veins.
Al used the shotgun.
Nine cows, one cat, and about half of our pumpkins turned to black.
“Any news on a cure?” he asked that night, his finger poised on the shotgun, looking at me the way he’d looked at those cows and our cat.
“Nothing yet.”
The next day, the news said a blood moon had risen in the night skies around Australia and China, at the same time those countries reported the fungus had finally spread to humans.
The nutters were quick to blame the blood moon.
The scientists said it was just a coincidence. But people had stopped listening to the scientists.
Stay indoors. Protect yourself from the blood moon, was the message relayed.
Al and I watched it all play out as if it was in slow motion. The spread of madness.
We had six hours before the blood moon was due in our skies, and so we went walking around our blackened pumpkin field. Al bought his shotgun, though I told him he didn’t have need for it, but he insisted. We even walked to the forest on the ridge where we’d played as kids. The fungus had spread there too, but we talked about the times when it had been green and how we used to practise shootin’ tin cans and building forts.
We talked about the good ol’ days, knowing there wouldn’t be too many days later.
Then, when we ran out of talk, we came back to our porch, poured ourselves some moonshine and sat on the steps just looking up at the sky, waiting for the blood moon.
“You think there’s anything in that talk about the moon spreadin’ the fungus to humans?” asked Al, his finger still on that shotgun trigger, his voice low.
“Nope.”
“Me neither.”
I looked down at my arm and could see the fungus running its way up my veins.
“You’ve been a good brother, Al.”
“You too, Davey.”
“Should we go inside?”
“Nah, let’s see that moon.”
And so we stayed, two brothers turning to black rot, waiting for an angel in white to come and collect our souls.
